Hastily Alexia dropped her hand and stepped back. “Let’s go,” she said.
Damon fell in beside her, and they set off for the temporary hilltop camp, moving in a random zigzag pattern to throw off potential pursuit and listening to every rustle of leaf and patter of tiny feet as birds and animals fled their approach. Naked as he was, Damon seemed little more than a ghost, sometimes ahead of her, sometimes behind, his skin absorbing what moonlight reached them as they kept to any cover they could find.
The deceptive quiet made what they found halfway back to the camp an ugly shock.
Damon stopped abruptly, head lifted, and gestured to Alexia. Within seconds she smelled what he had, and the two of them crept under the trees to the source of the stench.
The first corpse was a Daysider, his head nearly severed from his body, a pool of black blood soaking the earth underneath. Alexia guessed he’d been dead for at least six hours, probably longer. Damon crouched beside the body and touched the Daysider’s shoulder, his jaw clenched hard.
Alexia knew it was too risky to speak, so she let Damon examine the body and then went with him to find the second one. It lay a good dozen meters away—a female Nightsider, dressed in vampire daygear. Her helmet was missing, leaving her beautiful face exposed. A rash of burns pocked her skin, but they were not as severe as those of the double agent. She had been killed before the sun could complete its work, and the large, scorched hole in the chest of her suit made clear how she had died.
Damon studied her for a few moments, nodded to Alexia, and set off again. Neither of them spoke; there was far too much to say, and they were still in a very vulnerable position. By the time they reached camp—which was untouched, and still apparently safe —Alexia had managed to sort a dozen questions into some semblance of order.
She wiped her dry mouth with the back of her hand and paced in a circle around the hilltop, VS at the ready, trying to steady her emotions and buy a little more time while Damon dropped his pack and began unfolding his spare set of clothes. He seemed as reluctant to begin the conversation as she was.
“Who were they?” she asked at last.
“Council operatives,” he said, laying a neatly folded shirt, pants and socks on the top of his pack. His voice held no emotion, but Alexia had begun to learn how to read in it what might not be evident to anyone else.
He was angry, perhaps even grieved that his fellow agents had been slaughtered. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out who was responsible.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Lysander?”
“He wasn’t the only one.”
That wasn’t a very comforting answer, but it didn’t surprise her, either. God knew how many of them were running around the area now, setting up their little scheme to wipe out the colony.
Busy killing any and all opposition they could find.
“Did you know them?” she asked.
He gave short nod.
“Were they the other agents you mentioned when we met?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they were looking for enemy operatives when they were killed?”
“It is possible.”
Alexia knew he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, at least for the time being.
And they were still in grave danger.
Alexia’s grim reflections were cut short by Damon’s next words. “You should never have left camp alone,” he said.
The tension, uncertainty and violence of the past few hours had left Alexia with only the merest thread of control to hang on to, and now it snapped.
“Did you expect me to ask for your permission?” she demanded.
He stood up abruptly, his clean pants hanging from his good hand. “If you had been hurt—”
“Who was Lysander?” Alexia interrupted, taking the offensive. “What was between you two that made you hate each other so much?”
Damon jerked on the pants one leg after the other, testing the tough fabric to its limits.
“Lysander is—” he reached down for his shirt and shook it out “—was,” he corrected himself, “a midrank Freeblood with ambition. And a traitor to the Council.”
A Freeblood...one of the four basic ranks in Nightsider society, and the second lowest.
Freebloods were no longer vassal to any Bloodmaster or Bloodlord, but they had yet to establish households with serfs of their own, and so competition among them was particularly fierce.
“You didn’t know he was a traitor when you first found us, did you?” she asked. “You obviously wanted to kill him the moment you laid eyes on him, and he felt the same, whatever he was trying to achieve by lying to us.”
Damon crumpled the shirt in his good hand. “He would have behaved the same with any Darketan.”
“Maybe. But before you showed up, Lysander tried to convince me that he killed the other Nightsider because you had a personal grudge against the Expansionists that would make you believe what his victim said about not trusting him. But Lysander must have known all along that you’d never believe anything he said.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned Eirene. What happened, Damon? How was he involved?”
Fabric hissed as it tore in Damon’s fists. He stared down at the damage he had done to his spare shirt—and undoubtedly to his wrist, which he had pulled out of its sling—
before letting the garment fall to the ground.
Alexia tried again.
“Lysander said you were more driven by ‘irrational impulses’ than others of your kind. That that was why you were sent to work with me. What made him say that, Damon? What does it have to do with what you and I discussed before, about Darketans and feelings?”
His flat expression told her he wasn’t going to let her break him down. “We have far more important matters to discuss,” he said, “if we want to stay alive.”
He was right. She couldn’t waste time and energy trying to drag the truth out of him now, especially since there was one particular thing she had needed to know ever since she’d left camp late that morning. A question only Damon could answer.
Which was why she was alive at all.
Chapter 12
“Very well,” Alexia said, hardening her voice, “let’s talk about what happened yesterday.”
Damon pushed his good right arm through the sleeve of his shirt and took a deep breath. “It was necessary, Alexia,” he said.
So he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t understand her line of questioning. That was something, anyway.
“Necessary to use sex as a way to make me bite you?” she asked, carefully controlling her voice so as not to reveal how much even the thought of his lovemaking aroused her even now.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said, easing his other sleeve over his injured arm with exquisite care. “I didn’t have it planned.”
“Didn’t you?” Alexia slung the strap of the VS back over her shoulder and turned her back on him, walking to the nearest tree. She rested both palms on the trunk, inhaling and exhaling slowly the way she had been taught in the earliest years of her training.
“You said, before we...you said you wouldn’t take my choice from me. You lied.”
“And you broke your promise,” he retorted with some heat. “You tried to back out of it by asking me to remember your exact words. I believe they were ‘hang on as long as necessary.’” At least he didn’t seem to remember what she had told him when he had been under his “spell,” demanding so ferociously that she stay alive. “That’s right,” she said. “As long as necessary. But once Michael was dead—”
“It was even more necessary,” Damon said, “because you were the sole survivor of your team and the only one capable of completing your mission.”